Coronavirus: Easter egg sales surge despite lockdown

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UK consumers are turning to the internet to buy Easter eggs

Online sales of Easter eggs are surging as UK consumers turn to the internet during the coronavirus lockdown.

Easter is big business in Britain. In 2019, consumers spent £1.1bn on buying items to celebrate the festival, according to research firm Mintel, with £206m of that spent on Easter eggs alone.

But with the coronavirus lockdown preventing families and friends from meeting up to celebrate and Easter egg hunt activities cancelled, are consumers still spending as much this year?

Chocolate store chains Hotel Chocolat and Thorntons have both told the BBC that they have seen a “dramatic increase” in online orders since the lockdown started.

A spokeswoman for Thorntons said: “Since we voluntarily closed our High Street stores, we have seen a significant increase in online orders – demand is four times higher than average – and have received approximately one million visitors to our site this week.”

“We’ve seen increases in online sales of up to 400% and a quadrupling in web traffic last week,” Hotel Chocolat’s chief executive and co-founder Angus Thirlwell told the BBC.

Both chains have closed their physical stores, and while the online orders are welcome, new social distancing measures are in place and there are fewer staff in warehouses to pack orders.

Image copyrightThorntons

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Thorntons opens its website for just two hours each days to accept new customer orders

To deal with this situation, Thorntons has decided to open its website at 09:00 each day for just one or two hours for customer orders, before closing it again.

Hotel Chocolat is taking a different approach. Rather than have its staff waste time searching for products in the warehouse to fulfil orders, the chocolate maker has reduced the products that people can purchase online.

Instead, the retailer has created themed bundles and pre-packs the items into boxes the moment they come off the production line.

“We’ve created 30 new products from scratch,” said Mr Thirlwell, adding that customers had been much less demanding about their packages during the lockdown than they would typically be.

Discounting in supermarkets

In contrast, aisles fully stocked with Easter eggs have been widely discounted in supermarkets across the UK in the last two weeks, which is unusual for the run-up to the Easter holiday weekend.

The BBC asked Tesco and Sainsbury’s about their Easter egg sales, but the supermarkets declined to comment.

Chocolate manufacturer Kinnerton Confectionery makes many of the branded Easter eggs sold in these supermarkets, and it too has seen demand move online.

“With travel restrictions extending over Easter, consumers have turned to order Easter eggs online for home delivery to their loved ones,” Julia Catton, marketing and innovation director at Zertus UK, the parent company for Kinnerton Confectionery and several other chocolate brands, told the BBC.

Kinnerton itself set up a new online shop to allow customers of its Nomo vegan and “free-from” chocolate range to make direct orders if they couldn’t get the products from supermarkets.

However, according to US market research firm IRI, overall Easter confectionery sales for the week ending 28 March were down 17% year-on-year.

Ms Catton added: “The next few days will be important for Easter egg sales to see if demand improves.”

Other analysts also feel that there will be a significant impact on Easter spending, and that not everyone is buying Easter eggs.

Independent retail expert Kate Hardcastle says consumers will have to decide between the must-haves and nice-to-haves: “It’s just not front-of-mind focus for anyone, and it’s also an extra cost for a lot of families they just can’t afford.”

Image copyrightLisa Strachan

Mintel is running a weekly survey tracking the impacts of coronavirus on consumer spending in the UK. It says that in the last week, almost a quarter of British consumers increased the shopping they are doing online.

But in the last seven days, it also found that 46% of consumers have cut back on non-essential spending.

Despite this, Hotel Chocolat’s Angus Thirlwell says that his business is seeing consumer behaviour it’s never seen before in its 27-year-history.

“There’s a lot of people using online food shopping for the first time. People are asking for help in making orders on the online chat and calling customer service,” he said.

Hotel Chocolat is also seeing customer messages that show a shift in consumer habits, says Mr Thirlwell: “We’re seeing messages like, ‘Here’s something to keep your strength up’, or ‘Thinking of you’, sent to key workers, and families saying ‘Here’s some chocolate so we can FaceTime eating chocolate together’.